Inside the Jewel Vault with Carol Woolton

Carol Woolton	Enamel trompe eye brooch, Georgian	Faberge rock crystal lily of the valley objet de vertu
Cartier Art Deco & Egyptian faience brooch	Gold & diamond ring Raymond Templier	For the Love of God, Damien Hirst
JAR, diamond & pearl lily of the valley brooch

 

 JC         I am delighted to welcome Carol Woolton to the Jewel Vault.  Carol invented the concept of the jewellery editor, inaugurating the position at Tatler Magazine before moving to Vogue, where her hugely impressive tenure has spanned twenty years, and encompassed some of the most exciting changes in global jewellery design.  She has contributed widely to magazines, newspapers and online supplements around the world including The Financial Times, Vanity Fair, American Vogue and the Daily Telegraph.  She is the author of five books and also has a podcast of her own, If Jewels Could Talk.  Welcome, Carol I can’t wait to see what you have got for us inside the Jewel Vault!

 

CW      Well thank you so much for inviting me.

JC         Carol, I know you’ve taken care to choose pieces for your vault that take us through what you’ve written about so well in your books and journalism, about what jewellery means to us culturally, so I’m curious to know where this came from, or who inspired your interest in jewellery originally?

CW      I had influence from a very young age my father actually specialised in diamonds and gold and he spent a lot of time in Australia and South Africa. I spent some years in Australia with my family and further back than that I had a great grandfather or great great grandfather who went out to New South Wales in Australia as a prospector in the Gold Rush and he had two sons my great grandfather Alan Davidson who was a complete explorer pioneer prospector lived in the central Australian outback for two years no one heard from him prospecting, so he was really a bush man so I sort of feel that by osmosis I high had this DNA of stones and metals in my blood and my great grandfather’s brother actually was a managing director of News International in Australia he worked in Adelaide so I had a newspaper bit and the stone bit and I kind of feel that kind of feels to has to have filtered down through my blood and come out in me some way.  

JC       That is a fantastic story. You mentioned that you had set up on a career in journalism, can you talk us through how that happened?

CW    Yes it was writing that I pursued. I went to the London College of Fashion now the University of the Arts and studied Fashion Journalism, that’s what I wanted to do and I did actually - I went and worked after that after at a news service, and then actually I got a job at Vogue in those days as a secretary and then I did move on and write a beauty checklist, so I started off kind of writing quite a bit about lifestyle, beauty and decided that I wanted to specialise in jewellery primarily. I thought at the time that no one did that, nobody was really specializing…

JC       So you spotted a niche for you?

CW    So I spotted a niche, and a passion and you know what I thought about stones and jewellery came out and I found for me it had so much more depth than any other subject because of the Geology, the designers, the history, the culture of the people.  The fact is it linked me to, I feel, everybody around the world because we all wear jewellery in some form and it links me, I feel it’s a cultural link, it links me back to my great grandfather or to ancestors and how they lived and what was important to them.  I feel that and what we know about so many civilisations is what we’ve learnt from their jewellery – it’s given a guide to how they lived, and what they respected and what they honoured and their relationships.  Other things have rotted away but their jewellery is as fresh and full of stories and personal history as it was when it was made for them, and I find that endlessly fascinating and it’s a subject that absorbs me on a daily basis.  And at the time there was nobody in Condé Nast specialising in jewellery so I persuaded - I’d been a contributing editor at Tatler for some time - so I persuaded the editor Jane Proctor to make me their jewellery editor

JC       How did you go about that persuading Jane Proctor that you should be the jewellery editor?

CW    Well, I did it - she laughs about it -  I did it with quite a commercial hat on, and said you know: so here are stories for a year, this is what I think I can do, this is what I think is what I feel would be beneficial for the magazine in terms of revenue, and this is what I’d like to do, and she said oh okay I think that’s a great idea and off I went and then I essentially did the same to Alex Schulman who was at Vogue and I pursued that, and kept sending Alex pieces of my work and saying I would love to work at Vogue and so I then went to Vogue, and you know at the time American Vogue had an accessories editor, but nobody doing fine jewellery so I’ve also worked for American Vogue and Vogue China. My work’s been translated into different Vogues around the world and I think pretty much as soon as Alex Schulman took me onto Vogue most magazines took a jewellery editor.

JC       Amazing

JC       So do you feel that jewellery tells the story of our times just as meaningful as fashion does?

CW    Yes I think it does. I wrote the book “Vogue the Jewellery” some years ago and I said when I looked through the archives of Vogue, I thought that jewellery told the story of dress every bit as powerfully as fashion, because although we don’t think of it, or we don’t want to think of jewellery in terms of just being subject to fashion, it does tell that history of how we lived and how we dressed.  So I think looking into the archives, I found it was very strongly tells us a story of dress.

JC     Yes and also mores, you know the cultural standards of that time

CW    Exactly, endless quotes of people in the 30s “it was scarcely respectable to wear your diamonds at lunchtime” and everybody knew that!  Just marvellous quotes about things now that we would turn on their head because each generation wants to kick against the one before and make their own rules, their own rules about how the wear their jewellery and what’s important to them.

JC       So can you tell me Carol, what’s more important – what clothes you put on that day or what jewellery?

CW    Oh well I dress really according to what jewellery I’m going to wear that day and that doesn’t mean that I wear huge amounts of jewellery anyone who knows me knows that it’s earrings and rings that are my thing

JC Fascinating!  So you have chosen 6 fantastical pieces for your own fantasy vault – what was your criteria for choosing them?

CW    I think a great piece of jewellery is that, too, it’s a decorative object that just gives you pleasure.  But I want to thank you first of all for asking me first of all and I know you very kindly asked me when you for very first started and it’s taken me some time because I literally found this almost impossible to make a choice.  Over the years I’ve seen so much, as you can imagine – the historic pieces - Catherine the Great’s diamonds, the newly discovered biggest 3,000 carat diamond discovered and shown to me at Graff, whether it’s a jewel with a cloth with Charles I blood stain on it put underneath a diamond casing, Napoleon’s bee that fastened his cloak together before he went into battle that I’ve tried on, all the modern pieces: the little gold door of a Theo Fennell ring that opens up into a secret garden vista with gemstones and enamel that has painted, or a pair of Aztec deco fringed earrings that I commissioned Sean Leane to make, it could be any one of those.  I also love the way that modern techniques and modern technology is pushing jewellery, and the Nature Triumphant ring that I tried on a couple of years ago at Boucheron -  they scanned real petals of flowers and stabilised them, set them on platinum and set with a gemstone so it’s actually a flower, it’s a flower that will be eternal.  So it could be anything by James de Givenchy or Michelle Ong’s rose cut diamond pieces; any of those on a given day but you made me fine it down, and think about it!

JC       Well gosh.  So can we talk about the first piece, then?

CW    So the first piece is a miniature early 19th century, of an eye.

JC       A very enigmatic piece

CW    It’s very enigmatic and obviously it’s anonymous these things are executed in watercolour and then later enamelled painted on ivory, tiny portable portraits and you could keep it as a stand-in for the real person when you were parted or worn next to your heart and indeed King George IV was buried with a miniature of Maria FitzHerbert his mistress with whom he went through a secret marriage ceremony and it was buried with him on his heart where he said he used to keep it when he was alive and  I love this piece because it is interesting on so many levels you look at it it’s anonymous, it’s mysterious, it has a piercing case and you feel a connection to the subject even though you’ve never met her and her story is long forgotten but you have the feeling that you know her and it makes you imagine who she was, who she loved and what her story was and as there’s a little tromp d’oie tear and I feel it’s a sad story and they parted, the love affair has stalled for some reason and so it’s very elegant, it’s got that Georgian elegance, about it a beautiful jewelled object and I think also it has the eye, which is the window to the soul, the artist is trying to show and reflecting this person’s intimate innermost thoughts and the eye is one of the most powerful symbols used by man - symbol of watchfulness and intimacy and used in dozens of different cultures as a protective symbol.

JC       Yes

CW    Also has this element for me but it is the type of jewel that is influential in shaping the visual culture of the time.  So these portraits-in-little, they shine a light on the customs and behaviour and way of life at the time because as we saw recently if anyone watched the Netflix show Bridgerton, socialising was a very intense pursuit for the Georgians so the act of looking was very important in the structure of society and the time people were infatuated in seeing and being seen, there were new pleasure gardens set up, there were masquerades and dances every night,

JC       Of course

CW    And the social codes meant that people of the opposite sex, of particularly vulnerable ages couldn’t necessarily spend time together or exchange words, but looks could be exchanged easily.  So I think that it speaks of an intense moment in history and encapsulates an era as well as a Fashion

JC       Yes and it’s multilayered it really is and I hadn’t considered it until you just you described the numerous layers.  Where is this particular piece?

CW    This is at the V&A, it’s anonymous it’s also of its era in a way that obviously by the end of that century, nobody was doing that anymore or carrying these pieces because photography had struck a death blow to the miniature and I find that very interesting too, because in a way, this was what the Georgians did, and now we have our selfies.

JC       Yes

CW    People swap selfies - they might swap different body parts, not so elegant body parts!  So, I kind of like to compare it to then and now, and this is a sort of a human way of being, that we want to carry our loved ones or pictures of our loved ones around with us. I think also if we think of George IV and Mrs FitzHerbert, I think he had about 11 of these painted of himself and her, to give and receive and often they were they were at moments of heightened emotions in tumultuous relationships, you know it was like “please don’t give up on me”,  “please come and see me”, or “we can get together, we will be together in the end”.  I think you know they had all this messaging going on, secretly, that we obviously don’t know about.

JC    Lovely! And so on to the second piece in your vault….

CW    The second piece is around 1900 and it’s a piece by Peter Carl Fabergé, the great Russian goldsmith and designer and enameller, and I’ve seen a lot of work by Faberge - extraordinary carved stone animals & his enamelling work, which was copied by everybody he had hundreds of different colours and a particular way of layering the enamel, and beautiful pieces using Siberian sapphires, great beautifully cut chunks of aquamarine or amethyst but for me his flower studies are his most exquisite objects and I think the reason is that it is an extraordinary feat of craftsmanship to capture something so fleeting and delicate like a dandelion head or a ripening strawberry and not lose any sense of its delicacy whilst using unyielding the hardest materials known to man and I find that aspect very magical and I find the subject he’s used very compelling

JC       And this is a rock crystal vase containing a tiny spray of delicate lily-of-the-valley.

CW    That’s right. It’s very interesting that rock crystal was known as ice – ‘crystallos’ - by the ancient Greeks because it felt cold to the touch but had the appearance of water so it really to them was frozen water and I think here he’s demonstrated it perfectly simulating the curved surface of water lying inside a vase

JC       Yes

CW    It’s absolutely beautiful and I think the natural beauty of the flowers appealed to Fabergé which is why it’s so realistic, and that for the most part his pieces were really were botanically quite accurate as well, and they had stunning naturalism for his wealthy Russian clients and you can imagine they were living in these long long harsh winters, so homegrown flowers would be seen very briefly so these studies, decorative floral jewels acted as a reminder that spring would eventually come around again

JC       Yes of course yes I love the way you’ve described that, that’s beautiful Carol, so you’d have that in your Vault and I can see why…

CW     If I could I have them dotted around my house, actually, instead of fresh flowers I’d have them dotted everywhere

JC       So long as no one would knock them over

CW    I wouldn’t have to water them

JC       Or wash the vase! So tell me Carol what’s the third beautiful piece in your vault?

CW    The third one is 1925, dated, and it’s by Cartier.  And it’s this was made immediately following the discovery of King Tutankhamen’s tomb by Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon which was in 1923.  And obviously that was the biggest news globally and sparked a period of Egyptian everything in everything and everyone was inspired by these ancient treasures that were unearthed in the tomb.

JC       Yes breath taking.  So can you describe to us what it is?

CW    This is an ancient statuette dating from the second half of the first millennium and it’s the lion headed goddess, Sekhmet, who is an incarnation of the scorching eye of the Sun and she protected pharaohs and accompanied them during times of war and I think, you know everyone  - interior designers, fashion designers, jewellers - everyone was imitating Egyptian influences, in patterns, using hieroglyphics and the sacred scarabs and gods, but this Cartier one is on another level because it is created with this ancient piece of Egyptian, they’ve used this ancient statuette.  And Cartier set it with diamonds and sapphires in the fresh modern Art Deco style of the time at which they were at the forefront

JC       Is it a brooch?

CW    It is a brooch and it’s a stylised lotus blossom.  There is a diamond set bracelet little armband, golden belts and the Sun disc above decorated with rubies and emeralds, black enamel and diamonds, and so what I find very stunning about this piece is that it unites two great art movements, which is the Egyptian Revival Movement and Art Deco and I think the Art Deco movement as we know, cast aside traditions of the past to create shapes that were sleek and bold using geometric shapes and unorthodox combinations of stones and I think this to me combines all of that.  It’s got that extraordinary combination of ancient with entirely modern, new designs with ancient artwork, so I think it’s got so much and very visually arresting in a way that you wouldn’t imagine that would all work together.

JC       How would you wear it?

CW    I would probably wear it - I’d wear sort of high on a belt I think or just literally keeping together a blouse quite low, but just on its own and somewhere quite prominent so people could see it and maybe so I can see it.

JC       We are at piece four now, which is beautiful.  Are you going to tell us about this please?

CW    This is 1930. And it’s a ring, and it’s a ring in gold and platinum with a diamond set in the middle.  It’s Art Moderne and I’ve had experts look at it and they think it’s Raymond Templier

JC       It’s yours?

CW    And it’s mine!

JC      Carol! So it’s a personal treasure?

CW    It’s a personal treasure, but really encapsulates an era and an art movement that I’m really drawn to, it never fails to excite me when I look at this ring, and again, what I think is interesting about my choice of it is that it’s like, in a way, the Georgian brooch at the beginning - although the styles are so different, creatively they were both made and inspired by moments of turbulent change. I think social and economic change can sometimes provoke really interesting art and creation, and this - in the Georgian period you had the Industrial Revolution kicking off and so that was affecting everybody’s daily life and how they lived - and at this moment again it was technology that inspired Modernist principles with an emphasis on structure and technology and the new forms of the machine age – and they were geometric lines, circles, curved arcs - as you can see in this ring, almost like cogs and wheels, and that was all come about from this moment of you know, airplanes and cars and this sort of modern age of the machine.

JC       And it looks like it should feel quite hefty, comfortably hefty?

CW    Yes it’s comfortably hefty and I went to, many years ago, an exhibition on Art Moderne at the Musee d’Arts Decorative in Paris, and I saw a lot of work by Raymond Templier and Jean Despres. Jean Despres actually worked on the industrial design of airplanes during the war and that’s very evident in his industrial look, and the industrial look of Templiér but the jewels they created, although modern, were also graceful and refined and I think that’s quite an art to, to be able to combine those, and they really set about - they formed a group together of the Union of Modern Artists and they looked for a fresh direction and they wanted to move away from the past. Raymonde Templier was like a third or fourth generation jeweller, but he wanted to work away from the past that he’d grown up in, and create this new look and he said “I find inspiration as I walked the streets, from the wheels, to the cars and the machinery of today” and seeing these pieces in Paris made me determined to find one.

JC       Wow, so thank you for choosing that and sharing it with us.  How often do you think you wear this, is that something…

CW    I wear all the time and in fact in the Vogue office I was always wearing it and quite a lot of young designers particularly Dominic Jones was inspired to create a collection around “Carol’s Ring”!

JC       So it has its own fan-base!

CW    So it does, it has its own fan-base! And I did wear it relentlessly for years and now it comes and goes, but it’s always there and every time as I say I look at it it looks very very new to me, new and exciting.

JC       That’s four fabulous pieces, what is what is piece number five?

CW    Piece number five is not something you would wear.  It is “For the Love of God” the skull created in 2007 by the artist Damien Hirst.

JC       Yes and a very astonishing piece, and actually it had its own art gallery when it was first displayed, didn’t it?

CW      It did and I think it’s the thing, you really had to see it, and there was a lot of hype and a lot of publicity surrounding it and people were debating whether or not this was crass at the time, that it was about money - because it has 9,000 diamonds in it and this big, big centre pink diamond in the forehead of the skull - and a lot of people discussing it, but I have chosen each piece on the visceral effect it had on me physically when I saw these pieces and this as you know was displayed at White Cube Gallery in a blackened room with a light shining on it and when you walked in there you were just blown away by it, it had such an impact and I think it’s like a lot of things - you could see a million photographs of the Mona Lisa or see a million photographs of the Grand Canal in Venice and feel like you’ve seen it but until you’re there and see it in reality for yourself, you don’t get that impact and it really had that. 

And again there’s so many layers to make you think: it’s the effigy of death used so often in art, the skull, and it was in a black room on a black pedestal, but as I said, you know light bouncing off these thousands of tiny diamonds around the room, with this one large pear shaped pink mounted in the forehead almost like a third eye or a crown chakra, which gave it a sort of divine feeling or a divine aura bouncing around with this light. And I think often skulls are very sort of ghostly or dark and menacing, but this one, with the light and the diamonds all bouncing around almost seemed alive and rather magnificent and although it carries that message of the brevity of life and vanity of the human, it, as Damien Hirst said he felt it very hopeful, it is a very hopeful piece, and I think that the skull, the fragility of the skull and the message of dust to dust, ashes to ashes, has been made eternal by being recreated in platinum and the diamonds that we know have a life beyond our own which are eternal it has this sort of play on our own brevity of live and the eternal life of the jewel. 

Plus it has, it was a technical feat, there are 32 platinum plates that were made from its cast, it’s hand lasered with these thousands of tiny holes.  So the diamonds were individually set in like a honeycomb effect.  It was bold - obviously we know Damien Hirst is very bold - to create it, it was the most expensive jewellery commission since the Crown Jewels.  And I just love as I say this fragile decayed skull combined with ancient carbon from the Earth merging into something, again, with this very modern powerful appeal.

JC       Yeah

CW    I mean it really was compelling and he said at the time it’s the maximum I can throw against death.

JC       So the sixth and final piece Carol what have you put in your vault here?

CW    The sixth piece was created in 1991 by JAR - Joel Arthur Rosenthal - who is the great name of our period and it is an oriental pearl, it’s diamonds and gold platinum, and it is a lily-of-the-valley, as well. It’s kind of coincidence that I’ve chosen two lily-of-the-valley pieces because on the whole I really like hydrangeas but I like these jewelled lilies of the valleys. And this was exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum (New York) in 2014 they did a big show, a retrospective of the work of Joel Rosenthal and he’s the only living artist to be exhibited at a show like that and that really speaks about his importance as the most acclaimed of C20th in jewellery. He works in Paris, he is an American in Paris, he was born in New York, educated at Harvard and moved to Paris shortly after his graduation.  He worked very briefly for Bulgari, but essentially, started in jewellery making on his own, and he opened in 1978 in the Place Vendome, and he’s been there ever since.  Very quiet, he is fiercely protective of his work and his atelier, and is known for his incredible sense of colour, even though I’ve chosen a piece with very little colour, which is really essentially white, but like with Faberge for me, it’s his flower studies that I find so arresting. This piece actually appeared in my book “Floral Jewels” and Joel Rosenthal very kindly wrote the forward for me, for that book and I described in the book how he works surrounded by botanical journals, gardening journals, horticultural magazines, and there’s always a vase, tall stem flowers on flowers on his desk, you get the feeling that flowers are all around him and he visualises them very quickly, but executes them quite slowly, and works to their realism.

JC       So this is a beautiful piece, it’s a brooch, isn’t it?

CW    Yes it’s another brooch. Yes.

JC       It is an astonishing contrast isn’t it to pick something so fresh, fleeting and fragile as a spray of lily-of-the-valley - right after Damien Hirst’s mockery of our hubris isn’t it?

CW    But this gives me hope, you see, too. Damien Hirst created that as he saw it, to give people hope and this gives me tremendous hope, I think and the lily-of-the-valley by its nature, it’s delicate sprigs that shoot up in the spring through the frozen earth as you know they have this great strength even they look so delicate and it makes you think of rebirth and they’re known for “return to happiness” and I think there’s something about it that’s very heart stopping and when I saw it at the Met, it just had this great emotional reaction inside me

JC       Ah wonderful it really spoke to you.

CW    I don’t know whether is the nature of the very tremulous little scalloped edged diamond bells, the stalk loosely tied with a diamond ribbon, and this large oriental pearl that just slightly modestly drops in between to one side and it just that there is something about that fabrication just touched me.  And he does create each flower petal by petal, each piece is made separately so again it’s extraordinary feat of craftsmanship from one of his workshops but not even knowing that, just looking at it and that vulnerable nature of the lily-of-the-valley underpinned by its strength, really, really touches me

JC       Yes I can absolute get that.   

CW    And well it’s just loosely tied with a diamond ribbon you can imagine that somebody is gifting, that they’re gifting that lovely sprig, which is a really lovely thing to do

JC       It’s very innocent looking isn’t it and that’s the joy, the beauty of JAR’s pieces they look effortless

CW    Effortless but hugely sophisticated

JC       So overall, to go back to where we were at the beginning of our chat, Carol, you mentioned that to you, jewellery, is a vast subject - it covers so many different parts of our experience as humans.

CW    It does. I think writing my writing my “The New Stone Age” I try and talk about all these different subjects in my podcast you know the cultural influence, the stones, the people, historic use as well the modern and contemporary and what we’re doing now, because I think each of the pieces I’ve chosen pretty much was sparked by something important happening in art movements or important social economic changes, that do get people thinking and that thinking does provoke design and new design and people to sort of break rules and change things from the past and I think that comes through all of these pieces, they’re very exciting.

JC       So which… this is the question that that everyone has to come to and this is you said it was already difficult to choose six pieces so which one piece would you keep forever out of this glorious assortment of jewels and ornaments, precious objects, which one piece?

CW    Well I thought, if I am on a desert island and this is a sort of like your desert island choices really

JC       Yes, it is a bit

CW    I would think that I would take the JAR brooch with me

JC       Ah yes!

CW    Because a brooch does also have a functional aspect to it, it does attach pieces of fabric together and I might need that.  It does have a practicality, even though it’s just a beautiful object as well and I think, as I was talking about it symbolising hope and happiness and Spring, and I would imagine that I would be rescued from my island and returned and it would be something very, very hopeful, a symbol of strength, as well in my life, and you know, if it was in my normal day-to-day life, even if I didn’t wear it that much, because I wouldn’t want to wear it on the Tube or anything like that, I would just know I owned it and I would look at it every day in wonder

JC       As a charm to your life

JC         that’s beautiful Carol thank you.  Thank you I actually feel my eyes welling up. 

JC         Well look Carol it’s been such a joy to talk to you, to hear how meaningful jewellery is to you, and culture in general has been a real treat, so thank you so much for sharing your life and career in jewellery with us through these six beautiful objects.

CW       Well thank you so much for inviting me and making me think about it, and making me fine down my choices, as difficult as it as it was

 

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